puxzkkx wrote:Zedz, have you seen Japanese Summer: Double Suicide or A Treatise on Japanese Bawdy Song? I've got the former but can't get the latter presently.
Yes, in the Eclipse box, but I got that after I wrote up the other films. I think I commented on them somewhere, so I'll see if I can track the comments down.
Here you go:
Sing a Song of Sex
This was my first time seeing this film, and it does seem like a transitional work (but aren’t they all? I don’t think Oshima ever stood still as a filmmaker, even when I didn’t much like where he went). He’s really starting to move away from naturalistic narrative in earnest, and you can see the seeds for
Death by Hanging in certain scenes – particularly when the boy and girl re-enact his discovery of the teacher’s body (his “crime”). Over all, it seems an awful lot like a dry run for
Diary of a Shinjuku Thief – the songs, the sex, the layers of artificiality, the night walks, the slippage into ‘documentary’ – albeit one that’s straighter and a lot less ambitious.
I’ll need to see it a few more times before I have a better idea of just what Oshima’s trying to do (for instance, whether I’m projecting my own general annoyance at the smugness of the 60s protest song movement onto the film, or if Oshima’s also skewering the protestors’ thoroughly colonised, sanitised hollowness), but I have to say I loved the audacity of the opening sequence.
He starts with a negative parody of the Japanese flag (Oshima loves to play with this icon, from
The Sun’s Burial through
Boy – and is it
The Man Who Left His Will on Film that begins with a reversed flag image?) – a black ink sun on a red ground – then brutally restricts his palette to the three colours of the flag and its parody, white, red and black, for the next ten minutes. It is indeed like Rohmer’s idea for
Ma nuit chez Maud, as knives notes, or a White Stripes video. When he finally introduces a fourth colour (yellow) it’s in a shot that reiterates the source of the film’s initial colour scheme, with protestors marching along waving altered Japanese flags (black sun on white ground), and the fourth colour is thematically relevant as well (a ‘corrected’ sun colour). Once we enter the subway, brown appears, and in the next sequence we finally get a full palette, introduced through a particularly garish and self-referential means: a cavalcade of pulpy film posters. Beautiful stuff.
And another word on
Violence at Noon, since I watched that as well.
The real revelation of this film is not how many shots Oshima uses, but how he uses them. I find his experiments with montage in this film absolutely exhilarating. He’s not just breaking rules, but forging new ones, creating a dynamic, emotional montage with its own internal logic, not just a disruption of conventional logic. And, as others have noted, the film doesn’t ‘read’ as frantically edited: there are bursts of percussion, but there are also slower, slinkier passages, and you rarely get the sense that Oshima’s cutting just for the sake of it.
A good example of how he’s using montage effects in a creative way is the final scene on the train between the two women, when he intertwines their fates through contrapuntal montage. We start out with static shots of Shino intercut with grazing pans of Matsuko, then partway through the pattern shifts so that grazing pans of Shino are intercut with static shots of Matsuko, then they’re both implicated in the strikingly odd shot format (all the more striking because the film generally avoids flashy camera movement). And after this scene, they’re bound together both figuratively and literally.
Japanese Summer: Double Suicide
It's an interesting film but, again, I’ll need to see it a few more times to get a better idea of what Oshima was going for. I can understand Steven H’s reaction, and the film does seem uncommonly flippant, even for a great iconoclast like Oshima, but the film is so formally striking so often (great images and careful sound design) that I’m definitely giving him the benefit of the doubt.
Initial thoughts:
It seems pretty obvious that Oshima’s toying with unformed protagonists (she gives her age as zero), expressing their desires in stripped-down primal forms (the girl is preoccupied with sex and going to the toilet; the guys are preoccupied with violence): sex and death as disaffected play.
When the girl and the (second) boy finally get to fulfil their respective desires, they’re disappointed. There’s a theme of frustration – an inability to satisfactorlly copulate or excrete or kill, promised narrative events that don’t eventuate, a television being broken and repaired – and this is embodied in the language of the film, with a large number of unanswered questions (particularly those asked by the girl) and non sequiturs.
The visual motif of the shadow forms refers back to Hiroshima, but these can also be seen as potential adoptive identities. The boy and girl start out by lying down in the male and female forms drawn on the ground, then they try to fill out together the much larger human form dug out of the ground.
Given the frustrated nature of the film’s text and the frequent eloquence of its images, I wonder whether Oshima was attempting with this film to express complex ideas about Japanese identity and specifically the plight of contemporary youth trying to come to terms with variant and contradictory models of it (the patriotic rally, the samurai legacy, student protest, gangsters, soldiers) in primarily visual terms. For me, the first section of the film works extremely well in these terms, with some really rich imagery carrying a lot of thematic weight: the girl with the hands-over-her-eyes sunglasses (representing both see-no-evil wilful blindness and shielding oneself from an atomic blast); the couple fitting themselves up for Hiroshima shadows (Hiroshima being perhaps Ground Zero for modern Japanese identity); the gigantic human outline from whose genital region the gangsters excavate a ‘coffin’ containing guns.
The visual invention flags once everybody and everything gets stalled in the ‘bunker’ but livens up again when they get out, so the film seemed a little uneven to me, with a stodgy midsection, and I don’t know if I’d account the ‘experiment’ a success. Maybe it was a necessary preliminary workout for the works that followed, where he’d build image and text together rather than pitting them against one another.
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